Now that I’ve gotten Let’s Get Started with Dreamweaver out the door, I thought it would be a good time to catch up on a few Tips of the Day (which you may have noticed haven’t been happening lately). I have still been answering questions on Twitter as DWcourse so I’ll get back in the groove by covering some topics I’ve addressed there recently.

@michaellunsford asked if there was a way to reconstruct a lost Dreamweaver template from a page created with the template. The answer is yes but it’s a bit of work.

BTW, the steps here are based upon a Dreamweaver template recovery article from the University College London Website. I’ve tested my revised instructions in Mac Dreamweaver CS4 but they should work for earlier versions as well.

1. Open an “orphan” page created from the missing template.
2. Select menu File>Save as Template… If you get a warning dialog that the original template can’t be found, click OK to dismiss it.
3. 

   The name of the template used to create a page is displayed in the upper right corner of thedesign View.

   Give the file the same name as the original template (you can find the original template name in a yellow rectangle in the upper right corner of Dreamweaver’s Design View).

4. Click Save and, when prompted, allow Dreamweaver to update links in the file. The file will be saved in the a new or existing Templates folder in the root of your site.
5. Close the file in Dreamweaver.
6. Open the file in a text editor such as BBedit, TextEdit or NotePad.
7. Near the beginning of your file, delete the entire comment:

   <!-- InstanceBegin template="/Templates/yourtemplate.dwt" codeOutsideHTMLIsLocked="false" -->.

8. Immediately before the closing html tag </html> at the end of your document delete the entire comment:

   <!-- InstanceEnd -->.

9. Dreamweaver (at least in CS4) inserts a TemplateBeginEditable name=”head” area when saving a page as a template. You’ll need to delete that. So look for code it the head of the document that looks like this:

   <!-- InstanceBeginEditable name="head" --><meta name="keywords" content="test" />
   <!-- TemplateBeginEditable name="head" -->
   <!-- TemplateEndEditable -->
   <!-- InstanceEndEditable -->

   Delete the extra code:

   <!-- TemplateBeginEditable name="head" -->
   <!-- TemplateEndEditable -->

10. Now you need to convert all of the InstanceBeginEditable comments into TemplateBeginEditable comments. So search and replace all instances of the following being very careful to match the case of the words exactly:
    

    Search for: InstanceBegin
    Replace with: TemplateBegin

11. Now convert the closing comments as well.
    

    Search for: InstanceEnd
    Replace with: TemplateEnd

12. Save and close the file.

You should now be able to open and edit the file in Dreamweaver. When you save the file, all your changes should be applied to any document that used the original template.

As always, if you have questions feel free to comment here or tweet me at DWcourse.